1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a conventional technique for providing information to a user and processing an action that the user performs to the provided information, a system referred to as a graphical user interface (GUI) is spread generally. In GUI, the user designates an object on a screen with a designator such as a mouse, and selects an action to be subjected to the object from a menu screen.
In the technique referred to as a context menu in GUI in particular, a selectable operation is limited according to a format of object data to make it easy to designate an action by the user.
An application reading an E-mail utilizes a technique of providing object data by automatically hyperlinking part to be able to consider as an URL or mail address in a document.
There is a technique that when the first document is displayed, other related documents are shown (refer to, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-10981).
There is a technique of extracting a mark from a paper document marked by a user and an original document that is not marked, and performing an operation associated with a marked item (refer to, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 10-149410).
Further, there is a technique of executing an action based on an annotation input with a pen by a user (refer to, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-78053 bulletin reference).
The conventional technique only limits operation mechanically based on a formal clue, and is not able to cope with such high level demand that the operation desired by a user changes according to the content of data including a context as well as a format.
Different operations performed on a document by a user naturally, for example, different operations done with a pen, such as encircling the document, underlining the document, surrounding a text, inserting a character string and so on cannot be reflected to selection of the operations in association with the contents of the document.
It is an object of the invention to provide an information processing method capable of subjecting desired information included in a document to a process according to intention of a user, only by marking the document with a underline, a box, a character, a symbol and so on, and an apparatus therefor. For desired information had by the document.